- JP, 125m, 10m GT, ~0.08m GT/m (kind of in decline)
- SKR, 51m, 18m GT, ~0.35m GT/m (increasing in value)
- PRC, 1400m, 33 GT, ~0.02m GT/m (increasing++ in GT and value)
If modern US was serious as efficient as JP or SKR, it can do 30-120m GT per year. Meanwhile PRC casually building about entire 6 year US WW2 ship building program per year (2024 puts it close to 37m GT). But it's not out of question for US to be competitive in a few generations. But also kind of lulz that SKR peacetime ship building is like 7x more efficient than US during WW2.
Yes, IMO why DoD wanks about replicator and drone hellscape, when PRC doing the same thing. Everyone is trying to sink each others entire surface fleet... but those with industrial base (even if degraded) can reconstitute faster, i.e. PRC navy is "only" 3m GTs... about 1 month of current production, 2 months for all of USN @4.5m GT (yes 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month), but just to give scale of how "small" modern navies, including USN, are relative to modern shipbuilding.
I also doubt US built ships will ever be globally commercially competitive vs east asian builders (or whoever comes next), but the point is modern ship building has gotten efficient, and it's feasible for US to reshore enough ship building for domestic needs. I think for American's sake, it's illustrative to stop nostalgical pine for US WW2 ship building prowess, because it's really meagre compared to modern ship building scale.
Also be aware that if US WW2 shipping buildig dial was set to 10, PRC set the dial to not just 11, but 50. The consolation is it's very feasible for US to move dial from current 2 back to 10, perhaps even 20. And for US strategic interests (and ego) that's probably enough.
Hence "even if degraded" / "reconstitute faster"... relative post war reconstituting shipbuilding including infra is downstream of capable workforce. During war surface industry can't be protected (likely including CONUS). Post war, shipyards / industrial supply chains can be rebuild faster than it takes to train the workforce to man them. Shipyards also inherently fortified structures, the labour intensive part - earthworks, concrete - are hard to crack, at scale. Jiangnan (launched more GTs than whole of US post WW2 production), is like ~5x the size of all WW2 JP shipyards combined, it's not something US can substantively blowup. PRC a whole different scale of adversary vs what US historically calibrated to fight conventionally. VS relatively weaker USSR, US plan was basically to nuke their industry, nuke the fulda gap - conventional forces not scaled to cripple peer powers in their backyard. Regardless domestic shipbuilding isn't about ongoing sustaining war efforts anymore, it's about recovering from one, especially for maritime powers who knows their entire surface fleet could be wiped.
The Liberty ships were little more than motorized barges, with an expected lifespan of about 5 years. Comparing their tonnage to modern shipbuilding is silly.
No it's the entire point. I'm illustrating how US WW2 shipbuilding is pretty mid relative to modern shipbuilding, and that US, on paper should be able to exceed their WW2 output.
Currently JP, roughly pop size of US during WW2, is out producing peak US WW2 ship building in gross tonnage. They are known for building small/medium size higher value hulls closer to WW2 size. Modern shipbuilding during PEACE TIME with a competent workforce and industrial commitment, is capable of producing more GT of hulls with more complexity than US whole of society mobilization during WW2. Of course modern surface combatants are very complex, but USN force design 2045 is all about distributed lethality on less complex hulls + attritable autonomy. Lots of room for 5-10 year lifespan sensor/missile boats.
They proved durable enough for the high seas (something you generally can't say about barges) and many made multiple crossings of the oceans and plenty went on to live typical lengths of service in commercial use afterwards.
>But also kind of lulz that SKR peacetime ship building is like 7x more efficient than US during WW2.
there is huge difference between building 1 x 500k GT container ship and 50 ships x 10k GT
About future sea based fighting - Ukrainian sea drones armed with Sidewinders have already shot down Russian helicopters and one Su-30 fighter (may be even 2).
A small sea battle between such a drone and a manned Russian fast light seacraft https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djKIu4gC_sQ The drone lost this time, yet one can clearly see potential if the drone were also armed with a small anti-ship missile or just a radar guided machine gun (or they may be organized in a pack where each drone carries one type of weaponry while still staying small and agile). The poor Russian Marines had really hard time and that against just one remotely controlled drone - when the drones become fully autonomous with more suitable weaponry, and attacking as a pack instead of alone, humans wouldn't stand a chance.
I’m ruminating about making some very cheap and simple anti drone systems - the idea is how to respond if say in a small regional theater an adversary launches a million of drones. Don’t see many working in that direction while it should be a large market soon.
Japan specializes in higher value small/medium size ships, which they do at annual >US WW2 scale. Modern surface combatants much more sophisticated than liberty ships, but broader point is US WW2 ship building tier effort is not whole of nation wartime endeaver anymore, especially with 2.5x larger US pop. Even if US pivots to smaller hulls / unmanned fleet, larger ships still part of future navy force design and there's strategic use for large commerical ship building if US planners insist on maritime ship capacity. At the end of the day, if US wants to be a maritime power, it needs to have a maritime industrial base, even if maritime expeditionary model likely won't survive a peer war.
The U.S. seems to think it can out manufacture a country like China, or another peer competitor, during a potential war. This does not seem to be the case anymore... That level of American wartime manufacturing just is not possible anymore.
Maybe robotics and AI can be combined to close the gap... Its just that all competitors will be able to do that too.
Then consider that much of the U.S. aligned shipbuilding happens in places like South Korea. There is no guarantee the U.S. will be able to purchase ships from South Korea during a war in Asia.
Then again, surface ships are quickly becoming obsolete with drones and hypersonic missiles.
If the U.S. wants to get ahead, they need to build submarine drone carriers as quickly as possible.
Kinda agree with what you said. With the efficiency of china and the people working like soldiers, they can easily build an army of weapon in no time. But still in hope that we see less war in future.
I think the overwhelming Chinese population is a big factor that would prevent anyone out-manufacturing them.
I don't really have immense faith in the US leaders any more (as an outsider), but surely none of them genuinely believe the US can out-manufacture China?
Overpopulation in China has contributed to high job competition, leaving many people unemployed or underemployed. As a result, many are now willing to work long hours for lower wages just to make ends meet. Culturally, China places a strong emphasis on community and collective effort, valuing group success over individual recognition. This mindset, combined with a deep focus on efficiency, has been a key driver behind China’s success in manufacturing.
Let's see if there's anyone else that can give us more insight from the view of US.
The success of their manufacturing has its starts at low wages and long hours, etc as you said. But that is not as true as it used to be, and yet the manufacturing is still growing strong.
The reason is the application of state effort - the profits of this manufacturing is not private, but state owned (even if the factory is private). The state forces the owners of the factory to use the yuan, but keeps the export currency (in USD) - it is how china built up their massive reserves. The state uses this wealth to both build out civilian infrastructure and other forms of capital in a directed way (industrial policy), which also has enormous side benefits to military procurement.
So china's manufacturing power now comes not just from low(er) wages, but from proximity and ease of supply chains. If you needed a commodity XYZ component (like a bolt), you don't need to source it from a faraway place. If you needed a custom component designed, then the factory that would build it and the tooling is down the street.
Lots have been said of silicon valley's proximity benefit to tech startups. The same can be said for china's manufacturing hub(s). For the same reason many other places are unable to replicate silicon valley's success, it is the same with china's manufacturing.
Charles Paxton's Crystal Palace from the 1851 Great Exhibition belongs on the list too. Designed in 1 month, opened less than 10 months later, including a redesign to accommodate some trees instead of cutting them down. 3 times the size of St Paul's cathedral. Taken down and reassembled into a different building after the fair. Using entirely new technology including modular prefab cast-iron-and-glass-pane construction, interchangeable fasteners, and flush toilets.
I remember as a kid seeing the ghost fleet of Liberty Ships in the Hudson River near NYC. They gradually disappeared, with the last of them sold off in the early 70s. You could even buy parts like hatch covers from the ships in antique stores for a while until the supply dried up. It didn't mean much to me but certainly did for my parents' generation.
It's only #2 now, and US manufacturing output only equals the next four countries (Germany, Japan, India, South Korea) combined. And that's with only 8% of the workforce employed in manufacturing.
Radical goals, obedient workers, a peaceful environment on the continental, and the necessary industrialization capabilities all worked together to make this seemingly great thing happen.
It -is- important, for economic reasons. When you go to war with a tight labor market, you make the economy worse. George HW Bush learned this lesson the hard way.
It seems plausible that as you add more people to the project, the people added later have fewer skills or less interest compared to the ones who are more engaged ones who joined earlier.
Early war designs also had dangerous flaws that had to be corrected, which slowed down construction of subsequent ships, but made them less likely to spontaneously break apart.
Between that and muss less skilled, much less experienced labour producing ships in newly constructed shipyards with teething issues that were also in less ideal locations... something had to give, and taking a bit longer was the least bad option.
When I first read, years ago, about how many aircraft carriers the US Navy had during WW2, I was gobsmacked. But then I read how most of them were escort carriers, slow converted merchant ships with just a few planes. The US military currently has a lot of exquisite platforms; what it [mostly] lacks today is mass from cheaper systems.
We are dependent on a relatively small number of complex weapons systems. In a high intensity conflict with a peer like China, say, we could expect to loose a significant number of our big ticket items within a few days. It's a big mistake that we don't have a swarm of cheap systems mentality but I suppose that doesn't benefit the MIC so it's a no go. We'll pay for it some day.
This is the problem that the Pentagon’s Replicator Initiative is trying to solve.[1] However, the initiative (while well funded) only began less than two years ago. As MacArthur once said, every failure in war comes down to two words: “Too late.” We shall see.
It’s more nuanced, though. The choices made for the types of exquisite vs mass must be correct, and the mix of features of each system. With the WW2 aircraft carriers, a high number of the escort carriers were lost—they were slow and easily sunk. So it’s not clear they were a good allocation of resources. Light carriers—smaller and less well-armored than fleet carriers, but about as fast—did considerably better.
The GLSDB in Ukraine looked like it would turn the tide on paper—relatively cheap precision warheads with a huge stock of ammo which could outrange artillery and hit supply lines. But they’ve been a nonentity because of Russia’s electronic warfare capabilities. It’s similar with drones—Ukraine’s FPV drones stopped being effective due to EW, but then they switched to fiber optic cable and that’s made an enormous difference.
Aircraft carriers today are sitting ducks. The more we make, the more we’d lose.
Fortunately, these days with environmental law and historical protection the horrors of these shipyards will never again return. Give thanks. Our children won't have to suffer its results.
> the horrors of these shipyards will never again return.
and the peace dividend is still giving today. But many reckon the dividend is about to run out. And america has lost the capital to rebuild the "machine" to renew another peace dividend.
A friend and I were at the WW2 museum in New Orleans a couple years ago and he said something that really stuck with me. Amazed at an exhibit on wartime manufacturing, he turned to me and said, "This is so unbelievable to me. To think what we accomplished when everyone in the country was pulling in the same direction. There's no way that could happen anymore." I hardly want to glorify warfare, but he has a point. As a young person in our chaotic and ambiguous present day looking back into the haze of the past, there really is something incredibly romantic about the era of war mobilization. Ordinary people had a purpose simply assigned to them, and if nothing else I think it's still the case that people in all eras crave purpose.
The attitude is a dangerously rose-tinted view of war, the US was operating internment camps for US citizens of Japanese descent you know. In a war, dissent is quashed. That doesn't mean that it isn't there, just that there is a high tolerance for sub-optimal decisions because there isn't time to ruminate.
The US isn't getting poor outcomes from their manufacturing sector because people are divided, but because the US has policies tending towards deindustrialisation and there is a broad political consensus to keep them. Ban the smokestacks, ban the smokestack economy and enjoy the clean air.
> the US was operating internment camps for US citizens of Japanese descent you know
That is non-responsive to the point raised by OP. That had little effect on Americans unless they were the small minority of Japanese. The point OP raised is much more salient. If we end up in another World War, what lessons do you want to have from the past? “Don’t put racial minorities in internment camps” is well and good, but it won’t help you build a giant navy and win a war.
I learned con law from a social studies PhD who had little interest in the constitution, and focused the entire class on this or that minoritized or oppressed group. It’s a terrible way to learn constitutional law—or anything else—because you over-focus on the 20% of the story while missing the big picture about how the country was actually designed to work.
I think you missed their point. Everyone was pulling in the same direction because not doing so could land you in prison. During a war (a real declared one) you have little to no right to free speech. More than one person was jailed due to dissent.
That’s a good lesson. What the U.S. did in war time isn’t dissimilar to what China and Singapore did in peacetime to lift themselves out of poverty in a generation.
But Beijing doesn't suppresses dissent for economic reasons. Beijing suppresses dissent because social harmony is a core tenet of Chinese culture.
Also, the kind of centralized control the US imposed during WWII is not particularly useful for encouraging economic growth. China's economic growth was caused by Nixon's decision to bring China into the US-led maritime trading system plus Mao's dying and eventually being replaced by someone who was not completely incompetent at economic policy.
The reason China or Russia or Bangladesh cannot afford to adopt a British- or American-style culture that emphasizes liberty or heroic levels of individualism is that they have too many militarily-powerful neighbors: the combination of a culture that encourages free expression and experimentation with technologies that cause profound social changes with the geography of a China, Bangladesh or Russia will tend to lead to deadly civil wars, rebellions and invasions. If their geographical situation were like the US or the UK (i.e., secure in their respective islands, i.e., not in danger of invasion by land) then they would have the option of switching to a culture that emphasizes freedom of expression and free economic activity, and if they did that they would tend to reap considerable economic benefits over the decades.
The quashing of dissent isn't what is propelling them forward though - it is probably holding them back more than anything else. Allowing dissent and maybe even adjusting to it generally leads to better results in the long term.
I was mulling on my commute today as I dodged several homeless people. I can't speak to the US experience, but in Australia if I'd offered those people jobs at the wages and conditions of Chinese workers in the 90s, with the expectation of achieving the same civilisation progress as China ... I would expect to be fined and told off. If I persisted in running a business that way, eventually I'd probably be arrested.
Quashing dissent is illegal in the West, but that isn't the thing that needs to be changed to get industrial results. We need to legalise the industry part. Pollution has to be acceptable, mistakes decriminalised and it needs to be easy to employ people productively. All these Western countries are going a good way to banning mining, restricting cheap energy, blocking industrial processes as environmentally unsound and over-regulating how business is done. All on purpose and largely due to consensus opinions that too much industrial progress is bad for people. The result is much to most of the capital investment for the last few decades seeming to have happened in Asia where they were happy to let the world improve around them. It has nothing to do with division. If anything we don't have enough division, the people who want progress are hamstrung because they are forced to conform to the whims of timid environmentalists.
(and I endorse bcrosby95's reading of my comment).
And my counter-reading is that that cannot be all that important. If pulling together was what mattered in a clash between industrial powers, most societies would win most wars [0] because it isn't that hard to squash dissent if the generals want to.
The hammer gets bought down on dissenters, true enough. Happens in every big war, I count myself lucky that HN is remote and anonymous from some of the people I've talked to or I'm sure I'd have some nasty injuries from my views on the Ukraine war. But industrial production never has and never will be determined by how hard people wish for things and hold hands. Industrial production is a function of resource availability and capital investment. There is no strong need to get many people on side for either of those things and the people who handle capital investments tend to be a class that thinks alike so if a few are convinced then all of them will go along happily.
The pulling together is important insofar as bodies are required for the meat grinder and if you want to deploy literally everything in a war effort then work will be found for idle hands. But if we're talking about wartime manufacturing; it really isn't the major factor. The US is not industrially limited by its cohesion, it is limited by legislation written by people who are in the majority and enjoy a societal consensus which they are using to diminish industry.
[0] Which is logically impossible given that minimum of half the sides in wars must lose.
> That had little effect on Americans unless they were the small minority of Japanese.
Or the people killed in the Port Chicago disaster, and when enlisted men later refused to work due to unsafe conditions, they were court-martialed. ("Widespread publicity surrounding the case turned it into a cause célèbre among Americans opposing discrimination targeting African Americans; it and other race-related Navy protests of 1944–45 led the Navy to change its practices and initiate the desegregation of its forces beginning in February 1946.", quoting Wikipedia.)
Or the infamous Zoot Suit riots, where newly arrived white American servicemen thought Hispanic culture, including wearing zoot suits, was anti-American and unpatriotic - L.A. was one of several cities during the war with race riots (eg, the Beaumont race riot of 1943 caused by relocated white defense workers who attacked local black residents).
Not putting thousands workers into camps for no good reason will help you build a giant navy and win a war. It’s small compared to the whole country but it does help.
But the main lesson I'd want to take is to shut down strong aggressors early, then you don’t need to run a massive war production program in the first place.
Judging by Ukraine, we seem to have learned this lesson but not very well.
Preemptively getting involved in wars that don’t concern us isn’t a takeaway from world war ii. The circumstances that caused that were the result of 300 years of the Westphalian system, and are quite unique.
It might not be your takeaway but it sure is mine. All that stuff with Austria and Czechoslovakia didn’t concern us, until it did. Putting a stop to those shenanigans would have been a million times easier if done early.
You'd be involved in a million times more war. There are too many conflicts for that sort of thinking to work.
The lessons from WW1/2 were (1) don't be involved in the first few years of a World War, they are empire wreckers and (2) after a war, winners should invest in the economic success of the losers and (3) more Bismarck. Being even more aggressive would hardly have helped, the Europeans were all aggressive. Turns out aggression as a strategy led to ... more and bigger wars. Who'd a thunk it.
I was careful to say “strong aggressors.” You don’t need to go after every tinpot dictator who decides to pull something stupid. But something like Russia conquering bits of their neighbors should have been stopped early.
Europeans didn’t get aggressive with Germany until they invaded France, at which point it was too late to bring things to a conclusion without years of fighting and tens of millions killed. A stronger response to anything up to and including the invasion of Poland could have averted the catastrophe.
> But something like Russia conquering bits of their neighbors should have been stopped early.
So would it be fair to say that your WWII lesson is leading you to suggest escalating a war with a major nuclear power as the proper path forward? Because that should be setting off alarm bells that you learned the wrong lesson.
You can see in the world's reaction to the 2003 Iraq invasion; the correct response is no escalation and let the government of the defending country get pancaked. The damage is kept to a reasonable minimum and then some attempt can be made to put civilisation back together again. A China or a Russia going in to escalate the conflict or trying to stop the aggressors would have been a disaster for everyone. We could have had something as bad or worse than the Ukraine war 20 years earlier.
You don't think people with victory gardens, and buying warbonds, scraping together spare silk and aluminum and other metals to donate to the war effort, manufacturing of vehicles and other factories converted to output munitions and tanks and other materials is impressive?
You can be amazed at the output and the point of the article without turning this into yet another guilt post about how bad America is. What we did was wrong. But also, we stopped the nazis and the japanese and the italians. the war in the pacific killed 15-20 million chinese civilians, and I won't even go into the other theaters or the war crimes of the japanese or the axis powers (nothing to do with the internment). But maybe whatever the opposite of rose tinted glasses is the way you're viewing the wars.
And no, no amount of good by US forces justifies or absolves us of the sin of the japanese internment but maybe some credit is due at least.
Yup, but they needed arms to do that and a huge amount of Soviet arms came from the US.
The US supplied a little over half of all ammo, shells, mines, and explosives the Soviet Union used during the war. The US also supplied something like 400k trucks, 13k combat vehicles, 14k aircraft, and 13k tanks along with petroleum and food that the Soviet army needed to sustain operations.
"British intelligence, US material, and Soviet blood"
Which is STILL a ridiculous oversimplification that does not accurately capture the level of death and sheer effort expended because Germany and Japan decided that reality wasn't important and Fascism was neat.
I don't know how young you are but I was around the last time the American society nearly universally agreed on what direction to pull and it led to invading two countries (one on a notorious lie), around 60,000 casualties and god only knows how many civilian casualties, and five trillion dollars spent. Be careful what you wish for.
The Apollo programme is another example of this for me. You need an existential threat, or the threat of eternal embarrassment and suddenly everyone is pulling in the same direction.
IMO most of the world's woes these days are persisting because of a lack of political will to fix them.
I sometimes feel that China is able to achieve the things it's achieving because the government's near-absolute control over the population. The political power is absolute, and it's wielded in a very very effective way. If China decides tomorrow that they want to colonize Mars, they will probably get it done within a decade.
Societies today have immense latent potential. So many people are doing bullshit jobs that tick things over, sitting there wishing to be put to use for some intrinsically motivating purpose. An existential threat - war - is a well known way to bring that out. But war is too destructive for modern tastes.
We've seen developing countries get great results by government directing private industry in stronger ways than we're used to in the West. For example China's regularly published national development priorities for the next 5 years. If you hew to these you'll be helped in various ways. Singapore's and South Korea's rises to global powers were helped along by government getting everyone to row in the same direction - among other things, I'm greatly simplifying. But to focus on this one idea, I hope you can agree that providing purpose through top-down leadership is a great way to harness societies' latent potential and mobilize in a given direction..
Rudderless, laissez-faire governance got the US a surprisingly long way. But we are seeing the resultant directionlessness leave leaders unable to agree on whether to tear up what's been built, leave it in place, or go some completely random direction.
It's not the ships that were built, it's what they represented. That was what got them built.
The latent authoritarianism in in opinions like yours makes it easier to understand why authoritarians keep rising to the top of different societies, so they can destroy lives, squander wealth and crush individual peoples' own perfectly productive capacities for finding their own cooperative purposes in life.
Pretty sure the current crop of politicians that are destroying lives, squandering wealth, and crushing individual people are doing it as banner-bearers, not of any kind of Eastern collectivism, but of the uniquely American brand of 'fuck you, fuck everyone, fuck any responsibilities I may have, don't tread on me, I've got mine'.
I'd suggest you fixate just a bit less on just the media frenzy around the American example of Trump and his grab bag of incompetent nodding clowns in congress and cabinet for examples of authoritarianism in action. My comment was intended more broadly, because the problem is indeed broader.
There's no shortage of authoritarian governments all over the world, many of which use exactly the guise of collective purpose or some other similar nonsense to justify their destructive, repressive activities..
Well, of course they have to, it's kind of hard to run a regime that murders and tortures and robs people without, you know, at least pretending that you're doing it for their own good.
They also use 'upholding the law' as a common excuse, but that hardly results in "the guise of having laws or some other similar nonsense is an entry point to authoritarianism' becoming a reasonable thing to say.
You're assuming the agents behind all of this actually believe in anything but power and wealth, and aren't just cynically rolling out the authoritarian playbook to justify why they have to seize it.
The ones that were just cynically using this popular sentiment for their own benefit were the previous wave.
But the problem with that kind of thing is that eventually it results in a wave of true believers. It doesn't mean that they stop padding their pockets, mind you - why would they, when they're obviously entitled to their fair share as the Champions of Something Great. But it vastly increases their capacity for damage because now they are going to do it even in situations where it doesn't benefit them in any way, and may even harm them, for the sake of their beliefs.
Before Fight Club was the Hitchhiker's Guide "B-Ark". Before the B-Ark was Robads 1000 Clowns. Before 1000 Clowns was Chaplin's Modern Times. Before Modern Times was ... pretty much all of Dickens's ouvre. And that potted list omits much.
Laughing at the futility of present-day enterprise, whatever the present or the enterprise, is a long-standing tradition.
And really no need to call for culls, directly or otherwise.
Most obvious reason: Dickens characters would be quite bemused by the idea we need to Retvrn from "email jobs" because something something we need meaning. :)
Both are criticisms of the established economic order. I'm not trying to draw much further relation.
Again: there's a great deal other work. Erewhon, Looking Backwards, The Dispossessed come to mind. Arguably much of Neal Stephenson's work. Earlier, Gulliver's Travels and More's Utopia, though pre-industrial satire has a different vibe to it.
I don't see anything romantic about this. The mass mobilization of a society so well over 400,000 members of its youngest and brightest can die grotesquely overseas while industry, society and culture are forcefully synchronized to a single government issued purpose is not usually something to desire.
I do understand the needs of that particular war, The Nazis and Imperial Japan were truly invasive evils, big and globally dangerous enough to be worth fighting, even if it meant mass mobilization, but generally, there's no nostalgic beauty to such vast butchery, destruction and creation for the sake of destruction. I prefer finding my own purpose in life, and knowing that my children won't be ripped apart by artillery in some blood-soaked field of mud due to government decree.
Studs Terkel's collection of interviews with various populations of the USA in The Good War is a good antidote to overromanticization of World War 2 conditions.
Studs ran a daily program from the 1950s through at least the 1990s, and possibly into the 2000s. The sampling, depth, and breath is absolutely incredible.
Very much agreed, as are many other narratives, from both soldiers and civilians about the more cynical aspects and hardships of that purpose filled time. The people childishly downvoting my comment expressing a desire to not be forced into a vast government project of destruction and death would do well to read such texts.
Your comment is being downvoted not because they disagree with the noble opinion you express, but because you were misreading the comment you replied to, making yours a beautifully-written non-sequitur in context.
I think what the GP is relating to is that we could achieve so so sooo much more, if we didn't have all the opportunistic selfish people in our midst, who will go against any worthy goal, if it means they can enrich themselves. It is about the distribution of resources to reach goals. It would be quite easy for example to ensure, that every school meets some standards, enabling children to learn well. But there are always some lobbyists lobbying against it, and some politicians working against it, because there is no short term gain to be had for their business or for themselves. Also an educated population is maybe not what every politician wants in the first place, even though we all know, that raising the general education level would be beneficial in the long run.
Or what we could achieve in terms of renewable energy, if we all were behind the goal. There are many examples that benefit society, but anti-social forces and influences are everywhere, delaying, stopping, and sabotaging our future.
>It is about the distribution of resources to reach goals. It would be quite easy for example to ensure, that every school meets some standards, enabling children to learn well.
In the US, educational spending went up massively without much improvement in outcomes:
Small-government types like me aren't against good things. We just believe that it takes much more than simply throwing resources at a problem to solve it.
In my view, the "you're just against good things" finger-pointing merely gets in the way of a constructive discussion regarding what actually works.
Based on what I've read about WW2, the US was able to rapidly mobilize because it had great leadership at the time. We're not able to mobilize in the same way nowadays because our government leadership sucks. The civic culture is weaker (in part due to political polarization, and also demoralization due to our failures in Vietnam, Iraq, etc.). There's lots of anti-Americanism in America nowadays. Even the right has become anti-American. (Arguably, that's a good thing if it gets us in fewer wars!) And politicians seem to care more about signalling to their constituents that "something is being done" rather than actually succeeding at the thing.
Salaries are higher and projects are more exciting in the private sector. US multinationals are growing fast, and starving the US government of the brilliant, hardworking individuals that would be needed for the government to do awesome stuff. The government turns those people off due to red tape, lower salaries, and a generally bad working environment. I graduated from one of the top universities in the US, and I don't remember talking to any student who even considered working for the government.
You seem to be arguing against yourself here. At the beginning you are arguing for small government and against throwing money at problems, and at the end you are saying that we can't get good government because salaries are too low.
>In the US, educational spending went up massively without much improvement in outcomes:
Funding to school systems increased.
Not funding to education. Paying the superintendent more money doesn't teach the kids any better, especially when the teachers still can't afford basic office supplies.
This is a persistent myth in the US that "oh no actually we spend so much on education".
No. We've spent decades giving more and more and more of the US's resources to MBAs and middle managers who ignore their domain experts and just take home huge salaries and wonder why we aren't making any progress.
I'm not taking your claims at face value without a solid citation. But in any case, they would seem to underscore my point that just throwing money at a problem isn't sufficient. The money has to be spent in the right way, and it's not obvious how to do that in advance.
And rent-seekers are omnipresent. Greed motivates workers in the public sector just like it motivates workers in the private sector. There's nothing about the phrase "you are now working for the government" which makes someone magically less greedy. That's another point that your account underscores (assuming your account is accurate).
There was a fair bit of this after 9/11–and much of the military/intelligence apparatus expanded and figured out how to disrupt terrorist organizations—but it was shortlived as the Iraq War was divisive (and rightfully so).
>"there really is something incredibly romantic about the era of war mobilization. Ordinary people had a purpose simply assigned to them, and if nothing else I think it's still the case that people in all eras crave purpose."
Sure. Food rationing, mass poverty, inability to do anything but prescribed work, mass hysteria. All things to look forward to.
If enemy attacks you then you do not have to sit it out. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. But calling this "do" romantic is pure BS in my opinion, well unless somebody craves looking at mutilated corpses in "romantic" way.
Honestly, I felt the same way during the pandemic. People moved mountains to help each other and everyone in different ways.
Of course, the poison of social media took care of that in short order. FDR cracked down hard on misuse of the airwaves and the extremists for a reason.
The first one went over during evasive maneuvers while it was being moved by a tractor. So it wasn't tied down and the people on the ship can't schedule plane movements around missile and drone attacks. That the ship had to take evasive maneuvers tells us a missile or drone got close enough to be a danger, not a good situation.
The second plane went over when its hook missed the wire while landing. It happens.
Also there was a plane shot down by a guided missile cruiser.
Luckily in all cases the crew (including the guys moving the plane,) survived.
The Navy in that part of the world has been operating at a war tempo for quite a while. It's extremely dangerous at all times.
Citations in my comment below [1] that the Navy is operating ~14k sailors short of what is needed to operate safely, per the GAO. Assuming structural demographics and ongoing forward looking labor shortages, we can predict with significant confidence that the situation will only degrade further, as young labor has superior options for both operations and shipbuilding [2] [3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43921352 ("As of late last year, the Navy was lacking nearly 14,000 enlisted sailors to keep its aircraft carriers, surface ships and attack submarines properly manned, according to the GAO. The watchdog also found that aircraft carriers, cruisers and amphibious assault ships did not have enough enlisted sailors assigned to them to meet requirements for safe operations as laid out by the Navy Manpower Analysis Center.")
[3] Amid shortage, Navy recruiting program struggles to keep half first-year shipbuilders: Official - https://breakingdefense.com/2025/03/amid-shortage-navy-recru... - March 26, 2025 ("Difficulties in competing with the service industry wages in particular is a common complaint among shipbuilding executives. “It used to be that there was a big gap between manufacturing wages and other wages in any other industry,” Ingalls’ Shipbuilding President Kari Wilkinson told Breaking Defense in August. “Now you’ve got service industry wages — you can go down and be an attendant at Buc-ees for the same as an entry wage at a shipyard.”)
The context is that WWIII is basically a foregone conclusion? If there is a hot war between the US and China, that proves that humans aren't fit to control the planet.
The only way this makes sense for people is if they are racists deep down and think that humans should compete like ant colonies.
Warfare is a total failure of management and society.
The human zoos of the future are not going to allow warfare or build up to it.
We have instantaneous global communication and translation.
Some #s.
39-45:
- US, pop 130m, 40m Gross Tons. ~0.05m GT/m
2023:
- JP, 125m, 10m GT, ~0.08m GT/m (kind of in decline)
- SKR, 51m, 18m GT, ~0.35m GT/m (increasing in value)
- PRC, 1400m, 33 GT, ~0.02m GT/m (increasing++ in GT and value)
If modern US was serious as efficient as JP or SKR, it can do 30-120m GT per year. Meanwhile PRC casually building about entire 6 year US WW2 ship building program per year (2024 puts it close to 37m GT). But it's not out of question for US to be competitive in a few generations. But also kind of lulz that SKR peacetime ship building is like 7x more efficient than US during WW2.
> But it's not out of question for US to be competitive in a few generations.
i think it is - as in, if the need ever arises in a war, the loss would be far sooner than the time required for "competitiveness".
That is, of course, this new war is going to play out the same as the last one. But as with all history, it only rhymes.
Yes, IMO why DoD wanks about replicator and drone hellscape, when PRC doing the same thing. Everyone is trying to sink each others entire surface fleet... but those with industrial base (even if degraded) can reconstitute faster, i.e. PRC navy is "only" 3m GTs... about 1 month of current production, 2 months for all of USN @4.5m GT (yes 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month), but just to give scale of how "small" modern navies, including USN, are relative to modern shipbuilding.
I also doubt US built ships will ever be globally commercially competitive vs east asian builders (or whoever comes next), but the point is modern ship building has gotten efficient, and it's feasible for US to reshore enough ship building for domestic needs. I think for American's sake, it's illustrative to stop nostalgical pine for US WW2 ship building prowess, because it's really meagre compared to modern ship building scale.
Also be aware that if US WW2 shipping buildig dial was set to 10, PRC set the dial to not just 11, but 50. The consolation is it's very feasible for US to move dial from current 2 back to 10, perhaps even 20. And for US strategic interests (and ego) that's probably enough.
Unless if you blow up the shipbuilding infrastructure too.
Hence "even if degraded" / "reconstitute faster"... relative post war reconstituting shipbuilding including infra is downstream of capable workforce. During war surface industry can't be protected (likely including CONUS). Post war, shipyards / industrial supply chains can be rebuild faster than it takes to train the workforce to man them. Shipyards also inherently fortified structures, the labour intensive part - earthworks, concrete - are hard to crack, at scale. Jiangnan (launched more GTs than whole of US post WW2 production), is like ~5x the size of all WW2 JP shipyards combined, it's not something US can substantively blowup. PRC a whole different scale of adversary vs what US historically calibrated to fight conventionally. VS relatively weaker USSR, US plan was basically to nuke their industry, nuke the fulda gap - conventional forces not scaled to cripple peer powers in their backyard. Regardless domestic shipbuilding isn't about ongoing sustaining war efforts anymore, it's about recovering from one, especially for maritime powers who knows their entire surface fleet could be wiped.
The Liberty ships were little more than motorized barges, with an expected lifespan of about 5 years. Comparing their tonnage to modern shipbuilding is silly.
>is silly
No it's the entire point. I'm illustrating how US WW2 shipbuilding is pretty mid relative to modern shipbuilding, and that US, on paper should be able to exceed their WW2 output.
Currently JP, roughly pop size of US during WW2, is out producing peak US WW2 ship building in gross tonnage. They are known for building small/medium size higher value hulls closer to WW2 size. Modern shipbuilding during PEACE TIME with a competent workforce and industrial commitment, is capable of producing more GT of hulls with more complexity than US whole of society mobilization during WW2. Of course modern surface combatants are very complex, but USN force design 2045 is all about distributed lethality on less complex hulls + attritable autonomy. Lots of room for 5-10 year lifespan sensor/missile boats.
They proved durable enough for the high seas (something you generally can't say about barges) and many made multiple crossings of the oceans and plenty went on to live typical lengths of service in commercial use afterwards.
I wouldn't call them "motorized barges".
Don't forget the concrete ships.
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-concrete-fleet...
>But also kind of lulz that SKR peacetime ship building is like 7x more efficient than US during WW2.
there is huge difference between building 1 x 500k GT container ship and 50 ships x 10k GT
About future sea based fighting - Ukrainian sea drones armed with Sidewinders have already shot down Russian helicopters and one Su-30 fighter (may be even 2).
https://www.twz.com/sea/aim-9-sidewinder-armed-ukrainian-dro...
A small sea battle between such a drone and a manned Russian fast light seacraft https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djKIu4gC_sQ The drone lost this time, yet one can clearly see potential if the drone were also armed with a small anti-ship missile or just a radar guided machine gun (or they may be organized in a pack where each drone carries one type of weaponry while still staying small and agile). The poor Russian Marines had really hard time and that against just one remotely controlled drone - when the drones become fully autonomous with more suitable weaponry, and attacking as a pack instead of alone, humans wouldn't stand a chance.
I’m ruminating about making some very cheap and simple anti drone systems - the idea is how to respond if say in a small regional theater an adversary launches a million of drones. Don’t see many working in that direction while it should be a large market soon.
Japan specializes in higher value small/medium size ships, which they do at annual >US WW2 scale. Modern surface combatants much more sophisticated than liberty ships, but broader point is US WW2 ship building tier effort is not whole of nation wartime endeaver anymore, especially with 2.5x larger US pop. Even if US pivots to smaller hulls / unmanned fleet, larger ships still part of future navy force design and there's strategic use for large commerical ship building if US planners insist on maritime ship capacity. At the end of the day, if US wants to be a maritime power, it needs to have a maritime industrial base, even if maritime expeditionary model likely won't survive a peer war.
The U.S. seems to think it can out manufacture a country like China, or another peer competitor, during a potential war. This does not seem to be the case anymore... That level of American wartime manufacturing just is not possible anymore.
Maybe robotics and AI can be combined to close the gap... Its just that all competitors will be able to do that too.
Then consider that much of the U.S. aligned shipbuilding happens in places like South Korea. There is no guarantee the U.S. will be able to purchase ships from South Korea during a war in Asia.
Then again, surface ships are quickly becoming obsolete with drones and hypersonic missiles.
If the U.S. wants to get ahead, they need to build submarine drone carriers as quickly as possible.
Kinda agree with what you said. With the efficiency of china and the people working like soldiers, they can easily build an army of weapon in no time. But still in hope that we see less war in future.
I think the overwhelming Chinese population is a big factor that would prevent anyone out-manufacturing them.
I don't really have immense faith in the US leaders any more (as an outsider), but surely none of them genuinely believe the US can out-manufacture China?
Overpopulation in China has contributed to high job competition, leaving many people unemployed or underemployed. As a result, many are now willing to work long hours for lower wages just to make ends meet. Culturally, China places a strong emphasis on community and collective effort, valuing group success over individual recognition. This mindset, combined with a deep focus on efficiency, has been a key driver behind China’s success in manufacturing.
Let's see if there's anyone else that can give us more insight from the view of US.
The success of their manufacturing has its starts at low wages and long hours, etc as you said. But that is not as true as it used to be, and yet the manufacturing is still growing strong.
The reason is the application of state effort - the profits of this manufacturing is not private, but state owned (even if the factory is private). The state forces the owners of the factory to use the yuan, but keeps the export currency (in USD) - it is how china built up their massive reserves. The state uses this wealth to both build out civilian infrastructure and other forms of capital in a directed way (industrial policy), which also has enormous side benefits to military procurement.
So china's manufacturing power now comes not just from low(er) wages, but from proximity and ease of supply chains. If you needed a commodity XYZ component (like a bolt), you don't need to source it from a faraway place. If you needed a custom component designed, then the factory that would build it and the tooling is down the street.
Lots have been said of silicon valley's proximity benefit to tech startups. The same can be said for china's manufacturing hub(s). For the same reason many other places are unable to replicate silicon valley's success, it is the same with china's manufacturing.
> But still in hope that we see less war in future.
as the old saying goes, if you want peace, prepare for war.
Other things built quickly: https://patrickcollison.com/fast
I'm surprised this isn't on the list.
Charles Paxton's Crystal Palace from the 1851 Great Exhibition belongs on the list too. Designed in 1 month, opened less than 10 months later, including a redesign to accommodate some trees instead of cutting them down. 3 times the size of St Paul's cathedral. Taken down and reassembled into a different building after the fair. Using entirely new technology including modular prefab cast-iron-and-glass-pane construction, interchangeable fasteners, and flush toilets.
One of the shipyards discussed in the article, Marinship, is on Patrick's list.
I remember as a kid seeing the ghost fleet of Liberty Ships in the Hudson River near NYC. They gradually disappeared, with the last of them sold off in the early 70s. You could even buy parts like hatch covers from the ships in antique stores for a while until the supply dried up. It didn't mean much to me but certainly did for my parents' generation.
If you're interested in the US war build up in general, Freedom's Forge is an excellent read.
Back then the US was the No. manufacturimg power, probably equals Britain and Germany combined and more.
It's only #2 now, and US manufacturing output only equals the next four countries (Germany, Japan, India, South Korea) combined. And that's with only 8% of the workforce employed in manufacturing.
the gap between #1 and #2 basically makes US #1000 or something
Radical goals, obedient workers, a peaceful environment on the continental, and the necessary industrialization capabilities all worked together to make this seemingly great thing happen.
High unemployment going into it, too.
That's not important. In times of war the government can draft people and send them wherever it needs.
What might be more difficult to scale up is steel production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro...
Chips too, but old style boats without computers still float and maybe are even easier to build.
It -is- important, for economic reasons. When you go to war with a tight labor market, you make the economy worse. George HW Bush learned this lesson the hard way.
The interesting claim in the article is that US ship production was less efficient in terms of man-hours as quantity went up. That's unexpected.
It seems plausible that as you add more people to the project, the people added later have fewer skills or less interest compared to the ones who are more engaged ones who joined earlier.
Early war designs also had dangerous flaws that had to be corrected, which slowed down construction of subsequent ships, but made them less likely to spontaneously break apart.
Between that and muss less skilled, much less experienced labour producing ships in newly constructed shipyards with teething issues that were also in less ideal locations... something had to give, and taking a bit longer was the least bad option.
You have to think not having access to healthy 18+ year old men was an impact to the super physical jobs as well.
Could be economies of scale reaching a point of diminishing returns.
When I first read, years ago, about how many aircraft carriers the US Navy had during WW2, I was gobsmacked. But then I read how most of them were escort carriers, slow converted merchant ships with just a few planes. The US military currently has a lot of exquisite platforms; what it [mostly] lacks today is mass from cheaper systems.
It’d be good if we built more submarines, faster…
We are dependent on a relatively small number of complex weapons systems. In a high intensity conflict with a peer like China, say, we could expect to loose a significant number of our big ticket items within a few days. It's a big mistake that we don't have a swarm of cheap systems mentality but I suppose that doesn't benefit the MIC so it's a no go. We'll pay for it some day.
This is the problem that the Pentagon’s Replicator Initiative is trying to solve.[1] However, the initiative (while well funded) only began less than two years ago. As MacArthur once said, every failure in war comes down to two words: “Too late.” We shall see.
[1] https://www.diu.mil/replicator
It’s more nuanced, though. The choices made for the types of exquisite vs mass must be correct, and the mix of features of each system. With the WW2 aircraft carriers, a high number of the escort carriers were lost—they were slow and easily sunk. So it’s not clear they were a good allocation of resources. Light carriers—smaller and less well-armored than fleet carriers, but about as fast—did considerably better.
The GLSDB in Ukraine looked like it would turn the tide on paper—relatively cheap precision warheads with a huge stock of ammo which could outrange artillery and hit supply lines. But they’ve been a nonentity because of Russia’s electronic warfare capabilities. It’s similar with drones—Ukraine’s FPV drones stopped being effective due to EW, but then they switched to fiber optic cable and that’s made an enormous difference.
Aircraft carriers today are sitting ducks. The more we make, the more we’d lose.
So? Modularize it all, stick it into containers that can interact with other containers- put it on cargo-boats- problem solved.
Fortunately, these days with environmental law and historical protection the horrors of these shipyards will never again return. Give thanks. Our children won't have to suffer its results.
> the horrors of these shipyards will never again return.
and the peace dividend is still giving today. But many reckon the dividend is about to run out. And america has lost the capital to rebuild the "machine" to renew another peace dividend.
Not in peacetime maybe.
A friend and I were at the WW2 museum in New Orleans a couple years ago and he said something that really stuck with me. Amazed at an exhibit on wartime manufacturing, he turned to me and said, "This is so unbelievable to me. To think what we accomplished when everyone in the country was pulling in the same direction. There's no way that could happen anymore." I hardly want to glorify warfare, but he has a point. As a young person in our chaotic and ambiguous present day looking back into the haze of the past, there really is something incredibly romantic about the era of war mobilization. Ordinary people had a purpose simply assigned to them, and if nothing else I think it's still the case that people in all eras crave purpose.
The attitude is a dangerously rose-tinted view of war, the US was operating internment camps for US citizens of Japanese descent you know. In a war, dissent is quashed. That doesn't mean that it isn't there, just that there is a high tolerance for sub-optimal decisions because there isn't time to ruminate.
The US isn't getting poor outcomes from their manufacturing sector because people are divided, but because the US has policies tending towards deindustrialisation and there is a broad political consensus to keep them. Ban the smokestacks, ban the smokestack economy and enjoy the clean air.
> the US was operating internment camps for US citizens of Japanese descent you know
That is non-responsive to the point raised by OP. That had little effect on Americans unless they were the small minority of Japanese. The point OP raised is much more salient. If we end up in another World War, what lessons do you want to have from the past? “Don’t put racial minorities in internment camps” is well and good, but it won’t help you build a giant navy and win a war.
I learned con law from a social studies PhD who had little interest in the constitution, and focused the entire class on this or that minoritized or oppressed group. It’s a terrible way to learn constitutional law—or anything else—because you over-focus on the 20% of the story while missing the big picture about how the country was actually designed to work.
I think you missed their point. Everyone was pulling in the same direction because not doing so could land you in prison. During a war (a real declared one) you have little to no right to free speech. More than one person was jailed due to dissent.
That’s a good lesson. What the U.S. did in war time isn’t dissimilar to what China and Singapore did in peacetime to lift themselves out of poverty in a generation.
But Beijing doesn't suppresses dissent for economic reasons. Beijing suppresses dissent because social harmony is a core tenet of Chinese culture.
Also, the kind of centralized control the US imposed during WWII is not particularly useful for encouraging economic growth. China's economic growth was caused by Nixon's decision to bring China into the US-led maritime trading system plus Mao's dying and eventually being replaced by someone who was not completely incompetent at economic policy.
The reason China or Russia or Bangladesh cannot afford to adopt a British- or American-style culture that emphasizes liberty or heroic levels of individualism is that they have too many militarily-powerful neighbors: the combination of a culture that encourages free expression and experimentation with technologies that cause profound social changes with the geography of a China, Bangladesh or Russia will tend to lead to deadly civil wars, rebellions and invasions. If their geographical situation were like the US or the UK (i.e., secure in their respective islands, i.e., not in danger of invasion by land) then they would have the option of switching to a culture that emphasizes freedom of expression and free economic activity, and if they did that they would tend to reap considerable economic benefits over the decades.
The quashing of dissent isn't what is propelling them forward though - it is probably holding them back more than anything else. Allowing dissent and maybe even adjusting to it generally leads to better results in the long term.
I was mulling on my commute today as I dodged several homeless people. I can't speak to the US experience, but in Australia if I'd offered those people jobs at the wages and conditions of Chinese workers in the 90s, with the expectation of achieving the same civilisation progress as China ... I would expect to be fined and told off. If I persisted in running a business that way, eventually I'd probably be arrested.
Quashing dissent is illegal in the West, but that isn't the thing that needs to be changed to get industrial results. We need to legalise the industry part. Pollution has to be acceptable, mistakes decriminalised and it needs to be easy to employ people productively. All these Western countries are going a good way to banning mining, restricting cheap energy, blocking industrial processes as environmentally unsound and over-regulating how business is done. All on purpose and largely due to consensus opinions that too much industrial progress is bad for people. The result is much to most of the capital investment for the last few decades seeming to have happened in Asia where they were happy to let the world improve around them. It has nothing to do with division. If anything we don't have enough division, the people who want progress are hamstrung because they are forced to conform to the whims of timid environmentalists.
(and I endorse bcrosby95's reading of my comment).
> The quashing of dissent isn't what is propelling them forward though - it is probably holding them back more than anything else.
OP’s reading above was that quashing of dissent was what helped everyone pull in the same direction in world war ii.
And my counter-reading is that that cannot be all that important. If pulling together was what mattered in a clash between industrial powers, most societies would win most wars [0] because it isn't that hard to squash dissent if the generals want to.
The hammer gets bought down on dissenters, true enough. Happens in every big war, I count myself lucky that HN is remote and anonymous from some of the people I've talked to or I'm sure I'd have some nasty injuries from my views on the Ukraine war. But industrial production never has and never will be determined by how hard people wish for things and hold hands. Industrial production is a function of resource availability and capital investment. There is no strong need to get many people on side for either of those things and the people who handle capital investments tend to be a class that thinks alike so if a few are convinced then all of them will go along happily.
The pulling together is important insofar as bodies are required for the meat grinder and if you want to deploy literally everything in a war effort then work will be found for idle hands. But if we're talking about wartime manufacturing; it really isn't the major factor. The US is not industrially limited by its cohesion, it is limited by legislation written by people who are in the majority and enjoy a societal consensus which they are using to diminish industry.
[0] Which is logically impossible given that minimum of half the sides in wars must lose.
> That had little effect on Americans unless they were the small minority of Japanese.
Or the people killed in the Port Chicago disaster, and when enlisted men later refused to work due to unsafe conditions, they were court-martialed. ("Widespread publicity surrounding the case turned it into a cause célèbre among Americans opposing discrimination targeting African Americans; it and other race-related Navy protests of 1944–45 led the Navy to change its practices and initiate the desegregation of its forces beginning in February 1946.", quoting Wikipedia.)
Or the infamous Zoot Suit riots, where newly arrived white American servicemen thought Hispanic culture, including wearing zoot suits, was anti-American and unpatriotic - L.A. was one of several cities during the war with race riots (eg, the Beaumont race riot of 1943 caused by relocated white defense workers who attacked local black residents).
Not putting thousands workers into camps for no good reason will help you build a giant navy and win a war. It’s small compared to the whole country but it does help.
But the main lesson I'd want to take is to shut down strong aggressors early, then you don’t need to run a massive war production program in the first place.
Judging by Ukraine, we seem to have learned this lesson but not very well.
Preemptively getting involved in wars that don’t concern us isn’t a takeaway from world war ii. The circumstances that caused that were the result of 300 years of the Westphalian system, and are quite unique.
It might not be your takeaway but it sure is mine. All that stuff with Austria and Czechoslovakia didn’t concern us, until it did. Putting a stop to those shenanigans would have been a million times easier if done early.
You'd be involved in a million times more war. There are too many conflicts for that sort of thinking to work.
The lessons from WW1/2 were (1) don't be involved in the first few years of a World War, they are empire wreckers and (2) after a war, winners should invest in the economic success of the losers and (3) more Bismarck. Being even more aggressive would hardly have helped, the Europeans were all aggressive. Turns out aggression as a strategy led to ... more and bigger wars. Who'd a thunk it.
I was careful to say “strong aggressors.” You don’t need to go after every tinpot dictator who decides to pull something stupid. But something like Russia conquering bits of their neighbors should have been stopped early.
Europeans didn’t get aggressive with Germany until they invaded France, at which point it was too late to bring things to a conclusion without years of fighting and tens of millions killed. A stronger response to anything up to and including the invasion of Poland could have averted the catastrophe.
> But something like Russia conquering bits of their neighbors should have been stopped early.
So would it be fair to say that your WWII lesson is leading you to suggest escalating a war with a major nuclear power as the proper path forward? Because that should be setting off alarm bells that you learned the wrong lesson.
You can see in the world's reaction to the 2003 Iraq invasion; the correct response is no escalation and let the government of the defending country get pancaked. The damage is kept to a reasonable minimum and then some attempt can be made to put civilisation back together again. A China or a Russia going in to escalate the conflict or trying to stop the aggressors would have been a disaster for everyone. We could have had something as bad or worse than the Ukraine war 20 years earlier.
If we had put the kibosh on Russia’s adventures in 2014 then we wouldn’t need to fret about escalating to nukes today.
The world had no choice in 2003, the US couldn’t have been stopped regardless. Fortunately the US didn’t aim for conquest.
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Invitations to personalize big-picture issues is an invitation to irrationality. I blame Rawls.
I only learned recently that several Japanese Americans were killed in those camps.
[1]: https://www.history.com/articles/japanese-american-relocatio...
[2]: https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Homicide_in_camp/
Do you know about the Niihau Incident?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_incident
You don't think people with victory gardens, and buying warbonds, scraping together spare silk and aluminum and other metals to donate to the war effort, manufacturing of vehicles and other factories converted to output munitions and tanks and other materials is impressive?
You can be amazed at the output and the point of the article without turning this into yet another guilt post about how bad America is. What we did was wrong. But also, we stopped the nazis and the japanese and the italians. the war in the pacific killed 15-20 million chinese civilians, and I won't even go into the other theaters or the war crimes of the japanese or the axis powers (nothing to do with the internment). But maybe whatever the opposite of rose tinted glasses is the way you're viewing the wars.
And no, no amount of good by US forces justifies or absolves us of the sin of the japanese internment but maybe some credit is due at least.
FWIW, what stopped the Nazis, for the most part, was the bodies of Soviet conscripts.
Yup, but they needed arms to do that and a huge amount of Soviet arms came from the US.
The US supplied a little over half of all ammo, shells, mines, and explosives the Soviet Union used during the war. The US also supplied something like 400k trucks, 13k combat vehicles, 14k aircraft, and 13k tanks along with petroleum and food that the Soviet army needed to sustain operations.
"British intelligence, US material, and Soviet blood"
Which is STILL a ridiculous oversimplification that does not accurately capture the level of death and sheer effort expended because Germany and Japan decided that reality wasn't important and Fascism was neat.
The us is getting great manufacturing results - but because of automation only a few people labor and so it is invisible
We can't build ships.
We could but divison of labor is a good thing in general.
We do build some ships, though.
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I don't know how young you are but I was around the last time the American society nearly universally agreed on what direction to pull and it led to invading two countries (one on a notorious lie), around 60,000 casualties and god only knows how many civilian casualties, and five trillion dollars spent. Be careful what you wish for.
And then at the next election we re-elected the same people! It still boggles my mind.
The Apollo programme is another example of this for me. You need an existential threat, or the threat of eternal embarrassment and suddenly everyone is pulling in the same direction.
IMO most of the world's woes these days are persisting because of a lack of political will to fix them.
I sometimes feel that China is able to achieve the things it's achieving because the government's near-absolute control over the population. The political power is absolute, and it's wielded in a very very effective way. If China decides tomorrow that they want to colonize Mars, they will probably get it done within a decade.
That same near-absolute control is what drove the 4 pests campaign and cultural revolution so... Maybe don't emulate the cult of personality part?
Too late.
Yep, purpose.
Societies today have immense latent potential. So many people are doing bullshit jobs that tick things over, sitting there wishing to be put to use for some intrinsically motivating purpose. An existential threat - war - is a well known way to bring that out. But war is too destructive for modern tastes.
We've seen developing countries get great results by government directing private industry in stronger ways than we're used to in the West. For example China's regularly published national development priorities for the next 5 years. If you hew to these you'll be helped in various ways. Singapore's and South Korea's rises to global powers were helped along by government getting everyone to row in the same direction - among other things, I'm greatly simplifying. But to focus on this one idea, I hope you can agree that providing purpose through top-down leadership is a great way to harness societies' latent potential and mobilize in a given direction..
Rudderless, laissez-faire governance got the US a surprisingly long way. But we are seeing the resultant directionlessness leave leaders unable to agree on whether to tear up what's been built, leave it in place, or go some completely random direction.
It's not the ships that were built, it's what they represented. That was what got them built.
The latent authoritarianism in in opinions like yours makes it easier to understand why authoritarians keep rising to the top of different societies, so they can destroy lives, squander wealth and crush individual peoples' own perfectly productive capacities for finding their own cooperative purposes in life.
Pretty sure the current crop of politicians that are destroying lives, squandering wealth, and crushing individual people are doing it as banner-bearers, not of any kind of Eastern collectivism, but of the uniquely American brand of 'fuck you, fuck everyone, fuck any responsibilities I may have, don't tread on me, I've got mine'.
I'd suggest you fixate just a bit less on just the media frenzy around the American example of Trump and his grab bag of incompetent nodding clowns in congress and cabinet for examples of authoritarianism in action. My comment was intended more broadly, because the problem is indeed broader.
There's no shortage of authoritarian governments all over the world, many of which use exactly the guise of collective purpose or some other similar nonsense to justify their destructive, repressive activities..
Well, of course they have to, it's kind of hard to run a regime that murders and tortures and robs people without, you know, at least pretending that you're doing it for their own good.
They also use 'upholding the law' as a common excuse, but that hardly results in "the guise of having laws or some other similar nonsense is an entry point to authoritarianism' becoming a reasonable thing to say.
In their personal lives. When they have to deign to consider the impact of decisions on other people.
In their professional lives, they are Patriots Advancing American Independence.
The unquestioned Purpose is what enables the lack of care for others (that blossom in oh-so-many dangerous ways)
You're assuming the agents behind all of this actually believe in anything but power and wealth, and aren't just cynically rolling out the authoritarian playbook to justify why they have to seize it.
The ones that were just cynically using this popular sentiment for their own benefit were the previous wave.
But the problem with that kind of thing is that eventually it results in a wave of true believers. It doesn't mean that they stop padding their pockets, mind you - why would they, when they're obviously entitled to their fair share as the Champions of Something Great. But it vastly increases their capacity for damage because now they are going to do it even in situations where it doesn't benefit them in any way, and may even harm them, for the sake of their beliefs.
> So many people are doing bullshit jobs that tick things over, sitting there wishing to be put to use for some intrinsically motivating purpose
We're a generation of men raised by Fight Club—I'm wondering if a self-induced mass-culling event is really the answer we need.
Before Fight Club was the Hitchhiker's Guide "B-Ark". Before the B-Ark was Robads 1000 Clowns. Before 1000 Clowns was Chaplin's Modern Times. Before Modern Times was ... pretty much all of Dickens's ouvre. And that potted list omits much.
Laughing at the futility of present-day enterprise, whatever the present or the enterprise, is a long-standing tradition.
And really no need to call for culls, directly or otherwise.
Dickens ~= Fight Club is a tough sell. :)
Most obvious reason: Dickens characters would be quite bemused by the idea we need to Retvrn from "email jobs" because something something we need meaning. :)
Both are criticisms of the established economic order. I'm not trying to draw much further relation.
Again: there's a great deal other work. Erewhon, Looking Backwards, The Dispossessed come to mind. Arguably much of Neal Stephenson's work. Earlier, Gulliver's Travels and More's Utopia, though pre-industrial satire has a different vibe to it.
This turned up in search: Dystopian books on economy and work culture: <https://bookriot.com/dystopian-books-about-the-economy/>
I don't see anything romantic about this. The mass mobilization of a society so well over 400,000 members of its youngest and brightest can die grotesquely overseas while industry, society and culture are forcefully synchronized to a single government issued purpose is not usually something to desire.
I do understand the needs of that particular war, The Nazis and Imperial Japan were truly invasive evils, big and globally dangerous enough to be worth fighting, even if it meant mass mobilization, but generally, there's no nostalgic beauty to such vast butchery, destruction and creation for the sake of destruction. I prefer finding my own purpose in life, and knowing that my children won't be ripped apart by artillery in some blood-soaked field of mud due to government decree.
Studs Terkel's collection of interviews with various populations of the USA in The Good War is a good antidote to overromanticization of World War 2 conditions.
And if that's not enough for you, there's the Studs Terkel Radio Archive, which is an absolute treasure:
<https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/>
(There's a related podcast, though it appears on hiatus: <https://studs.show/>).
This is wonderful! Thanks for the link. I appreciate Terkel's work but didn't know about this particular source.
Enjoy! It really is amazing.
Studs ran a daily program from the 1950s through at least the 1990s, and possibly into the 2000s. The sampling, depth, and breath is absolutely incredible.
Very much agreed, as are many other narratives, from both soldiers and civilians about the more cynical aspects and hardships of that purpose filled time. The people childishly downvoting my comment expressing a desire to not be forced into a vast government project of destruction and death would do well to read such texts.
Your comment is being downvoted not because they disagree with the noble opinion you express, but because you were misreading the comment you replied to, making yours a beautifully-written non-sequitur in context.
I think what the GP is relating to is that we could achieve so so sooo much more, if we didn't have all the opportunistic selfish people in our midst, who will go against any worthy goal, if it means they can enrich themselves. It is about the distribution of resources to reach goals. It would be quite easy for example to ensure, that every school meets some standards, enabling children to learn well. But there are always some lobbyists lobbying against it, and some politicians working against it, because there is no short term gain to be had for their business or for themselves. Also an educated population is maybe not what every politician wants in the first place, even though we all know, that raising the general education level would be beneficial in the long run.
Or what we could achieve in terms of renewable energy, if we all were behind the goal. There are many examples that benefit society, but anti-social forces and influences are everywhere, delaying, stopping, and sabotaging our future.
You're strawmanning.
>It is about the distribution of resources to reach goals. It would be quite easy for example to ensure, that every school meets some standards, enabling children to learn well.
In the US, educational spending went up massively without much improvement in outcomes:
https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/primary_scost.gif
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/mar/02/dave-brat/...
Small-government types like me aren't against good things. We just believe that it takes much more than simply throwing resources at a problem to solve it.
In my view, the "you're just against good things" finger-pointing merely gets in the way of a constructive discussion regarding what actually works.
Based on what I've read about WW2, the US was able to rapidly mobilize because it had great leadership at the time. We're not able to mobilize in the same way nowadays because our government leadership sucks. The civic culture is weaker (in part due to political polarization, and also demoralization due to our failures in Vietnam, Iraq, etc.). There's lots of anti-Americanism in America nowadays. Even the right has become anti-American. (Arguably, that's a good thing if it gets us in fewer wars!) And politicians seem to care more about signalling to their constituents that "something is being done" rather than actually succeeding at the thing.
Salaries are higher and projects are more exciting in the private sector. US multinationals are growing fast, and starving the US government of the brilliant, hardworking individuals that would be needed for the government to do awesome stuff. The government turns those people off due to red tape, lower salaries, and a generally bad working environment. I graduated from one of the top universities in the US, and I don't remember talking to any student who even considered working for the government.
You seem to be arguing against yourself here. At the beginning you are arguing for small government and against throwing money at problems, and at the end you are saying that we can't get good government because salaries are too low.
I think good salaries are necessary but far from sufficient. This blog seems good, here's a post on hiring in particular:
https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/dear-mr-kupor-please-fix-fede...
>In the US, educational spending went up massively without much improvement in outcomes:
Funding to school systems increased.
Not funding to education. Paying the superintendent more money doesn't teach the kids any better, especially when the teachers still can't afford basic office supplies.
This is a persistent myth in the US that "oh no actually we spend so much on education".
No. We've spent decades giving more and more and more of the US's resources to MBAs and middle managers who ignore their domain experts and just take home huge salaries and wonder why we aren't making any progress.
I'm not taking your claims at face value without a solid citation. But in any case, they would seem to underscore my point that just throwing money at a problem isn't sufficient. The money has to be spent in the right way, and it's not obvious how to do that in advance.
And rent-seekers are omnipresent. Greed motivates workers in the public sector just like it motivates workers in the private sector. There's nothing about the phrase "you are now working for the government" which makes someone magically less greedy. That's another point that your account underscores (assuming your account is accurate).
There was a fair bit of this after 9/11–and much of the military/intelligence apparatus expanded and figured out how to disrupt terrorist organizations—but it was shortlived as the Iraq War was divisive (and rightfully so).
Same for very early on in COVID
>"there really is something incredibly romantic about the era of war mobilization. Ordinary people had a purpose simply assigned to them, and if nothing else I think it's still the case that people in all eras crave purpose."
Sure. Food rationing, mass poverty, inability to do anything but prescribed work, mass hysteria. All things to look forward to.
Yeah next time we can just sit it out and let the enemy bayonet babies and slaughter 20 million Chinese people. Ever read rape of nanking?
>"...just sit it out and let the enemy..."
If enemy attacks you then you do not have to sit it out. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. But calling this "do" romantic is pure BS in my opinion, well unless somebody craves looking at mutilated corpses in "romantic" way.
Honestly, I felt the same way during the pandemic. People moved mountains to help each other and everyone in different ways.
Of course, the poison of social media took care of that in short order. FDR cracked down hard on misuse of the airwaves and the extremists for a reason.
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This the same Navy that can't keep an F/A-18 tethered to the deck?
The first one went over during evasive maneuvers while it was being moved by a tractor. So it wasn't tied down and the people on the ship can't schedule plane movements around missile and drone attacks. That the ship had to take evasive maneuvers tells us a missile or drone got close enough to be a danger, not a good situation. The second plane went over when its hook missed the wire while landing. It happens. Also there was a plane shot down by a guided missile cruiser. Luckily in all cases the crew (including the guys moving the plane,) survived. The Navy in that part of the world has been operating at a war tempo for quite a while. It's extremely dangerous at all times.
Citations in my comment below [1] that the Navy is operating ~14k sailors short of what is needed to operate safely, per the GAO. Assuming structural demographics and ongoing forward looking labor shortages, we can predict with significant confidence that the situation will only degrade further, as young labor has superior options for both operations and shipbuilding [2] [3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43921352 ("As of late last year, the Navy was lacking nearly 14,000 enlisted sailors to keep its aircraft carriers, surface ships and attack submarines properly manned, according to the GAO. The watchdog also found that aircraft carriers, cruisers and amphibious assault ships did not have enough enlisted sailors assigned to them to meet requirements for safe operations as laid out by the Navy Manpower Analysis Center.")
[2] The High-School Juniors With $70,000-a-Year Job Offers - https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/skilled-trades-high-sc... - May 7, 2025
[3] Amid shortage, Navy recruiting program struggles to keep half first-year shipbuilders: Official - https://breakingdefense.com/2025/03/amid-shortage-navy-recru... - March 26, 2025 ("Difficulties in competing with the service industry wages in particular is a common complaint among shipbuilding executives. “It used to be that there was a big gap between manufacturing wages and other wages in any other industry,” Ingalls’ Shipbuilding President Kari Wilkinson told Breaking Defense in August. “Now you’ve got service industry wages — you can go down and be an attendant at Buc-ees for the same as an entry wage at a shipyard.”)
Missing all 4 wires does happen now and then but it very very rarely results in the plane ending up in the water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolter_(aeronautics)
There are examples I'm sure of them messing up, but anyone who's tried to mess with them.. Doesn't end well. I'm an EU appreciator.
> This the same Navy that can't keep an F/A-18 tethered to the deck?
They'll mess up and still find a way to make it your problem :)
The context is that WWIII is basically a foregone conclusion? If there is a hot war between the US and China, that proves that humans aren't fit to control the planet.
The only way this makes sense for people is if they are racists deep down and think that humans should compete like ant colonies.
Warfare is a total failure of management and society.
The human zoos of the future are not going to allow warfare or build up to it.
We have instantaneous global communication and translation.
You have it backwards, weakness encourages conflict, we get WWIII when there is a belief that the gains will outweigh the losses.
Our modern peace is not from enlightenment but because war became too destructive. Peace should never be assumed.